The American poet Robert Frost once likened free verse to
playing tennis with the net down. Jazz probably has more purists to
the square mile even than literature and 'freedom', actual or so
called, has always had a rough ride from jazz critics. Just as
abandoning rhyme and metre took away the very qualities that made
poetry poetic, so, they believed, abandoning a fixed rhythm and a
recurrent chord structure seemed to mean an end to the very
qualities that made jazz jazz.

Out To Lunch is certainly Eric Dolphy's most
adventurous album and his most self consistent attempt at freedom
within some, at least of the confines established by bop
writing.

Dolphy was never at his best in a context like the Coltrane
Quartet where the bulk of the solo work was extended harmonic
development over a relatively stable rhythmic line. Elvin Jones's
use of polyrhythms never got far away from time-keeping. Doubling
and augmenting times was something Dolphy had learned in the
fraught days with Mingus and it is Mingus who really marks the end
of the conventional rhythm section and introduces a degree of
'democracy' among all the separate voices of the jazz group.

On Out To Lunch Tony Williams (still Anthony in those
days) rarely lays down a regular line. Occasionally, as on "Hat And
Beard" or "Gazzelloni", he will produce a countable figure on the
hi-hat – a bebop staple – while improvising on the rest of the kit.
Neither, though, do Davis or Hutcherson take on any strict rhythmic
responsibilities. The bassist has the unnerving habit of varying
both line and style for each new soloist. Hutcherson uses both
space and silence, avoidance of a beat and, in any case, plays in a
sharply percussive, chiming way that is a million miles from Milt
Jackson or from the piano chording which he replaces on the
set.

In a quite literal sense, the quintet are following the Weather
Report dictum: "Everyone solos, all of the time". Hutcherson, to
underline the shift away from the piano's traditional role, has the
freest brief of the five; admirably he makes no attempt either to
keep up with the horns or to settle for an accompanist's role. His
aural range is extraordinary, from a soft wooden xylophone sound on
the weaving "Straight Up And Down" to staccato fills followed by
strummed rolls on "Hat And Beard" .

Hubbard, who had sounded uneasy as Don Cherry's alter ego on the
Free Jazz sessions, seems least at home. It is usually he
who tries to bring things back within bounds. Unable to take cover
in pedal notes or (all that often) in extended ensemble passages,
he relies on fanfare effects and slower counterpoints to Dolphy's
impassioned solos. Davis plucks, slaps, bows and strums as the mood
and melody take him; Hutcherson uses the fullest range of his
unwieldy instrument; Williams switches from brushes to heavy
stick-work to slapped cymbals; Dolphy, with three horns, uses every
available tonal range. It is Hubbard's trumpet, perhaps inevitably
given that his pedigree and subsequent development suggest more
mainstream modal tastes, which is the least flexible of the five
voices.

Dolphy revels in what Hubbard clearly finds disturbing. While
uneasy listeners will find a centre of gravity in the trumpet, the
real excitement is elsewhere. Dolphy is an 'episodic' player, like
an obsessive tale-spinner who shifts from 'reminds me of' to 'and
then there was the time when', not quite non sequiturs but not
quite obviously connected either. He was an instant composer rather
than a strict improviser; bebop had established the pattern of
transforming songs in this way; Dolphy merely extended the habit,
doing it four or five times in a single cut. By contrast, a
Coltrane solo is one long story, filled out with circumstantial
detail, insistently hammered home, almost without digression. Where
Coltrane sounded relentless, Dolphy whips from idea to idea at
great speed.

Nowhere is that more noticeable than on "Gazzelloni" where the
lightness of the flute underlines the speed of response. There he
is ably supported by Davis who of the group seems best able to keep
up with the pace and depth of Dolphy's ideas. Their duet intro to
"Something Sweet, Something Tender" is the most immediately
accessible section on the album (reminiscent of their famous
bass/bass clarinet duet reading of "Alone Together") and prompts
the thought that Out To Lunch might have been more
effective with a measure of reticence, a few holdings back rather
than the all-in (both senses) approach Dolphy favoured at that
time. Perhaps charts detailing a few duet and trio passages would
have paid dividends.

The critical tendency has been to praise the lyricism of
"Something Sweet, Something Tender" but to conclude that the whole
is still rather less than the sum of the parts. That is
understandable but rather like attacking Shakespeare for not
producing a rigorous psychoanalysis of Hamlet's Oedipus complex and
Ophelia's schizophrenia. The apparatus simply didn't exist. Dolphy
was still forced to work with a formulation (and, critically, with
players) which depended on a head plus solos, verse and chorus
approach. His commitment to freedom was consistent; the approach
and results weren't yet coherent.

Reid Miles' famous jacket illustration showed a "Will be back
at" shop sign with seven clock hands pointing in as many
directions. That, along with the argot title, suggested that this
was just wacky stuff, even perhaps a joke, certainly directionless.
Whatever else, the cover made a neat emblem for Dolphy's lack of
concern with issues of time and 'correct' musical behaviour. He
wasn't yet able to harness the energies of his sidemen to his
musical conception but set alongside its exact contemporaries, sets
like A Love Supreme and Ayler's Ghosts, it is
Dolphy who sounds at once more 'contemporary' and more deeply
rooted in the jazz and bebop traditions.

Straight after Out To Lunch, Eric Dolphy headed east;
not to jazz-conscious Scandinavia, where Ayler had found a niche of
tolerance and respect, nor as far east as Coltrane's musical
wanderings, but to Berlin. It seemed a significant choice, a
divided city, still redolent of defeat and crisis, on one side
constrained and dogmatic, on the other, westernised and apparently
given over to pleasure and play. The contradictions of the place
were already in Dolphy's bloodstream.

Four months after Out To Lunch he died of
uraemia, only days past his thirty-sixth birthday.

Comments

This is where Trout Mask Replica got its chops from, it seems to me, yet this one is musically more gratifying,though its influence is less obvious

hans altena

10|11|2014

Beefheart was an utterly shite sax player, Eric Dolphy was one of the great multi-instrumentalist of the last 50 years.

Sen

04|06|2015

Dolphins is a master of exploration and seeking freedom beyond freedom...beautiful analysis

Jeffre Sinclair

26|08|2015

Does Brian Morton expect his long-planned book on Eric Dolphy to be published any time soon?

John Evans

09|09|2015

Nice to see such a gem of a review - very in line with what the album represents. It's of its time and out of time in equal terms. Most of Dolphy's explicit or implicit followers chose not to embrace the modest aesthetic pursued on this album, accentuating the more audacious and "free" sound at the expense of the somewhat idiosyncratic elements that make "Out to Lunch" unique. (Davis, Williams, and Hutcherson are inimitable in the way in which they both respect and diss the norm, and I doubt even they could ever go back to that moment and re-live it after 1964.)
One correction, though: I though Booker Little (like Kenny Dorham) died of uraemia (in 1962); Dolphy died of untreated diabetes. I heard he suffered a diabetic shock while in Germany and passed away while in a coma.

zdzis

19|06|2016

People seem to think of Capt beefheart as a good musician, as others around him would attest, he was a complete amateur with delusions of grandeur. His band mate said he thought he was stravinsky. He was a genius, sure, but he didn't know much about music. He would just hammer on his piano and make his band mate transcribe it. The polymeter rhythms come from his lack of rhythm, most likely. Like accidentally continuing a phrase longer than it should. it shows what great music can be done with a lot of work and passion, but thinking he was a great musician is completely false